Refugee camp
Meloni’s Albania plans come before European justice system
Italy’s plans for refugee camps in Albania are being followed closely in the EU. Now it’s going to the European Court of Justice. A court in Bologna draws a comparison with Nazi Germany.
The Italian right-wing government’s plans to accommodate Mediterranean refugees outside the EU are now also becoming a case for the European justice system. At the request of a court in Bologna, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg is to examine a new decree with which the right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wants to save her project. Their first attempt to have a decision on the asylum applications of migrants in a camp in Albania failed because of the Italian justice system. The two recently opened warehouses are now empty again.
The court in the northern Italian city of Bologna called the ECJ on Tuesday to review the decree passed by the Meloni government just last week. In particular, it concerns a list of 19 supposedly safe countries of origin for migrants. Such lists are also controversial in other countries of the European Union. Meloni’s handling of Mediterranean refugees is being followed closely within the EU.
Dispute over the classification of safe countries of origin
The basis is the case of a man who was picked up on a refugee boat on the Mediterranean with 15 other migrants from Bangladesh and Egypt in mid-October and then taken to Albania by an Italian ship. His asylum application was rejected within 24 hours. However, a court in Rome then decided that all migrants had to be brought to Italy because, according to EU law, neither Bangladesh nor Egypt were completely safe countries of origin. In the new decree from the Meloni government, both states are defined this way again.
The court in Bologna now referred to a ECJ decision according to which a country can only be classified as safe if all social groups in the entire country are actually safe. To explain this, the judges drew a comparison with Nazi Germany: “Germany under the Nazi regime was an extremely safe country for the vast majority of the German population: apart from Jews, homosexuals, political opponents, people of Roma ethnicity and other minority groups, more could than 60 million Germans enjoy an enviable state of security.”
dpa
Source: Stern
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